The strange political afterlife of Arnold Schwarzenegger

Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger speaks outside of The United States Supreme Court after an oral arguments in Gill v. Whitford to call for an end to partisan gerrymandering on October 3, 2017 in Washington, DC. | Olivier Douliery/Getty Images

Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger speaks outside of The United States Supreme Court after an oral arguments in Gill v. Whitford to call for an end to partisan gerrymandering on October 3, 2017 in Washington, DC. | Olivier Douliery/Getty Images

MUNICH, Germany — The Governator is off to conduct the band at his favorite beer tent at Oktoberfest. Why? Well, he finished his salty half-chicken, gave the photographers the pose he knew they wanted — the one holding the giant beer stein and mime-biting the oversize pretzel — and he’s not quite ready for dessert.

Oh, but w­­­­­hy? Because he wants to. The crowd chants his name. He crouches forward, making a show of drawing out the tubas with his fingers. He does a muscleman pose. He pretends to blow a trumpet. In the beer tent, he makes his pecs dance.

Welcome to the strange and wondrous political afterlife of Arnold Schwarzenegger, a rural Austrian kid who parlayed his success as perhaps the greatest bodybuilder of all time into a lucrative career as Hollywood’s top action hero, then parlayed that into becoming the improbable Republican governor of California for two terms.

Now, six years after leaving Sacramento, he’s still reinventing himself — as a kind of globetrotting do-gooder, promoting a handful of causes like fighting climate change and gerrymandering. But mostly, he’s having a hell of a good time. Wherever he goes, everybody knows him. Everybody loves him. With a net worth estimated at $300 million, he zips around the world in private jets and has restaurant owners pick up his tab because they’re just so honored he chose to eat there. Constant selfies. He sounds off on whatever he wants, but has no actual responsibility. His perfect day is waking up and not knowing what country he’ll eat dinner in.

On this particular Tuesday afternoon, Schwarzenegger is stopping at the Munich Oktoberfest just for fun, part of a whirlwind six-day European tour that began with inspirational speeches in England, then a jaunt to a factory in Austria to test out the new electric Hummer converted just for him, then to Barcelona for his Arnold Classic bodybuilding tournament, then popping up to San Sebastián, Spain, to premiere the 3D “Wonders of the Sea” movie from Jean-MichelCousteau that he narrated and produced. Then here to Munich, for a stop he’s been making regularly since he was a young bodybuilder and won a stone-lifting contest (508 kilograms, or almost 1,120 pounds). The next day, he’ll have his assistant scramble a plane for a drop-in at Arnie’s Life Museum, the Schwarzenegger shrine in the house where he grew up in the hills outside Graz, Austria. Then, it’s back to the U.S. to hear oral arguments in Gill v. Whitford, the nonpartisan redistricting case that’s become his latest passion, and to L.A. again to host an appreciation dinner for Republicans in the California legislature who backed his push for a stiffer crackdown on greenhouse gases.

All of a sudden, a guy who just turned 70 — in Barcelona, he celebrated the 50th anniversary of winning Mr. Universe, which began his breakthrough — and had seen politics pass him by is … back. But why? Schwarzenegger is barred from another run for governor and has no interest in the Senate; a certain clause in the Constitution is keeping him out of the White House. He’s making movies again, though nothing huge. In a Hillary Clinton presidency, he had been planning to be one of the Republican moderate voices urging his party to find ways to work together. The Schwarzenegger Institute at USC would be hosting after-school program summits and earnest environmental speeches. It would have been his own peculiar form of keeping busy, but with nothing like the urgency he feels now.

Instead, Schwarzenegger is back in the public eye because of what he calls “a disastrous situation” — the Trump presidency. It’s the topic he can’t escape, even at his news conference in San Sebastián about the oceans documentary. What do you think of Trump?What do you think people should do about Trump? In Spain, he deflects. He’s there to promote the movie, and he wants the headline to be about Cousteau’s film, which he backed because the French oceanographer convinced him that people will be more likely to save the ocean if they fall in love with it.

Arnold Schwarzenegger arrives at the Maria Cristina Hotel during at the 65th San Sebastian International Film Festival on September 25, 2017 in San Sebastián, Spain | Carlos Alvarez/Getty Images

In the air two days later, flying back from checking in on his museum, he answers: He avoids talking about Trump in these situations because after all those years of having cameras chase him wherever he goes, he knows how the media works — whatever he says about Trump becomes the quote, and he wants to talk about his other causes.

But Schwarzenegger is perfectly happy to blow his way into Trump’s spotlight when it suits him — he even keeps a Bobblehead of Trump in his kitchen that he used for a viral video in which he lectured the president about racism. Cameras swarmed his after-school summit at USC this year after he made another video slamming Trump for a budget proposing major cuts, and Trump took time out of the National Prayer Breakfast to swipe at him. Every word he says about environmentalism gets more attention since Trump announced the withdrawal from the Paris global climate accords, and he gets to brag about relative GDP growth on his watch: “If the federal government, Republicans and Democrats, and Donald Trump and his whole White House would be smart, they would just copy exactly what we are doing in California,” he said in Spain.

He also gets Trump on a visceral level — like they’re twins, say, separated at birth. They are the same age. Both have been global celebrities for decades — Schwarzenegger ever since he first won the Mr. Universe competition at age 20, which he later said was “my ticket to America, the land of opportunity, where I could become a star and get rich.” Each has a history of boasting about his sexual conquests and an instinct for the viral quote — like Schwarzenegger’s famous riff comparing pumping iron to orgasms. One man claims never to have had a headache, stomachache or allergy; the other’s doctor declared him the fittest man ever to seek the presidency. One was underestimated by political elites because of his Austrian accent and bulging physique; the other due to his outer-borough mannerisms and outrageous statements. And whereas Arnold’s fame skyrocketed, thanks to showdowns with Lou Ferrigno and the evil T-1000, Donald has turned his penchant for tabloid-fueled feuds into a governing philosophy.

So doesn’t it complicate things to have people ask him about Trump all the time, to have the leader of the free world tweet about his “Celebrity Apprentice” ratings?

Not at all, Schwarzenegger says. “Trump helps me.” And maybe, in a way, he’s even doing more good than harm. “A lot of times, we crucify Trump for doing certain things, and then in the end, deep down inside, [it’s like] ‘Well actually, that was helpful,’” he says. “People get more educated because he starts talking about things that no one ever thought about.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger (L) attends the ‘Wonder Of The Sea 3D’ photocall at the Kursaal Palace during the 65th San Sebastian International Film Festival on September 25, 2017 in San Sebastián, Spain | Carlos Alvarez/Getty Images

Schwarzenegger’s father was literally a Nazi, though an investigation by the Simon Wiesenthal Center found no evidence his dad had ever committed any atrocities. The general subject of Nazis is one he usually avoids, but he says he can’t understand Trump’s reluctance to condemn the white supremacists after violent protests in Charlottesville, Virginia.

“We have seen the history of that kind of behavior. It’s not like this is new,” he tells me. “This has always gone in the wrong f–king direction in history. I’m not a history buff or anything, but there’s one thing I know: that that is not good.”

“Last Action Hero!” an American woman in the crowd shouts as he walks off the bandstand.

“Save America, Arnold!” shouts another next to her.

* * *

“Last Action Hero,” Schwarzenegger tells me later, was a movie he knew was bad as they were making it. The director said he wanted to make “E.T.” That’s not going to work, he remembers saying in his trailer. People come to see an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, they hear the words “last action hero” and they figure no one else survives and he’s shooting his way through.

This is what it’s like to hang out with the Governator, who had invited me to tag along with him in Europe because … well, I’m not exactly sure why. He is bursting with theories and opinions about everything, and enjoys talking about movies, and politics, and culture, and sports, and public policy — and whatever else crosses his mind.

Now we’re in the backyard of his childhood home that’s been turned into a museum, a two-story yellow house stuffed with memorabilia from his weightlifting and movie careers. For reasons no one can quite explain, the yard is now filled with a collection of giant Transformers sculptures. He wasn’t in any of the movies, and he’s only seen the first one (it didn’t hold him, he says, because it was all explosions and no plot). Nowadays, his tastes run to artier fare, like “Black Swan” or “Dunkirk” — lots of shooting and stuff blowing up, but with a point.

There are three mannequins of him inside, plus the giant flexing bronze outside by the front door. He makes fun of the haircut on the one from his bodybuilding days, now standing in what used to be his parents’ bedroom.

“What’s it like to have a museum to yourself?” I ask him as he takes a seat at a table set up for us downstairs with glasses of schnapps and a spread of pastries. “I don’t think about it,” he says. He has a jelly-filled donut, and launches into a 10-minute speech about what he learned from the local politicians he admired in Austria as a teenager.

Schwarzenegger speaks in sports metaphors. He says that every policy debate, even health care, has a sweet spot that would make it fly if everyone could just work together to hit it. He also talks in terms of machines and guns, when he’s not throwing in the odd reference to Milton Friedman. Certain people have a chip wrong in them, he’ll say, or he’ll explain the philosophy of how he pursues his causes by imagining how a robot from the future might do it. “It’s the shotgun approach versus the rifle approach. This is the rifle approach. Specific target. This is where I go. Let’s not spread out and try five different things,” he says.

Schwarzenegger throws his money around for what he believes in — “I couldn’t tell you a system. It’s really a gut reaction kind of thing,” he says. He talks about it in $100,000 chunks. After Charlottesville, the Simon Wiesenthal Center got a chunk, plus all the proceeds from a “Terminate Hate” T-shirt he had made up with red, white and blue flowers sticking out of the barrel in one of his most iconic images, the one in the leather jacket and sunglasses. The center’s founder, Rabbi Marvin Hier — also famous for delivering the Jewish blessing at Trump’s inauguration — questioned whether they should have a gun on an anti-hate T-shirt. Come on, Schwarzenegger told him. It’s the Terminator.

He got involved in after-school programs after visiting schools where his fitness programs were big in the 1980s. The Special Olympics taught him the value of government funding. He recycled before he was elected, but only when he was governor did he get interested in actual environmental policy. Infrastructure and immigration stuck with him, and above all, to his surprise, he became attached to the issues of gerrymandering and election reform.

“There were certain things that stuck because I got exposed to it, and then all of a sudden, something in me found great joy in it,” he says.

Arnold Schwarzenegger attends the ‘Wonder Of The Sea 3D’ premiere at the Victoria Eugenia Teather during the 65th San Sebastian International Film Festival on September 25, 2017 in San Sebastián, Spain | Carlos Alvarez/Getty Images

Schwarzenegger has always been ambitious — he’s a firm believer in having a vision of success, and willing it to happen, like the first time he bench-pressed 500 pounds — but he got into politics on a whim. He tells the story like this: When he started in movies, Sylvester Stallone was the enemy. Schwarzenegger didn’t like him, and didn’t like that he was the top box-office draw. He set out to take him down. Twenty years later, he felt like California’s then-governor Gray Davis was a jerk to him in a meeting about after-school programs, and suddenly the Terminator became obsessed with knocking him out.

In San Sebastián, over red wine and cheese and bread — after years of fanatic abstemious dieting, he’s happy to indulge in some carbs — he whips out his iPad and records a video that he turns into an endorsement on the fly for Rep. Rod Blum, the Iowa Republican who was one of the three dozen members of Congress whom Schwarzenegger called last month, urging them to sign on to an amicus brief in the gerrymandering case. Somewhere over France on the way to Munich the next morning, he tinkers with a statement on an arcane dispute between two warring bodybuilding federations. In Graz the next day, he bats around taking up Prince Albert’s offer to have a private jet pick him up for a gala in Monaco celebrating Leonardo DiCaprio and protecting the oceans. Ultimately, he decides not to go. But he was never going to get in a tuxedo for it — “I don’t like rules,” he explains.

At the Supreme Court on Tuesday for the gerrymandering arguments, he couldn’t get around the no cellphone rule. Schwarzenegger loves FaceTime and Snapchat; once, he even pulled out his iPad to record a video in the middle of a papal mass at the Vatican. But he loved seeing the justices in action for the first time, remarking on how they jumped all over the lawyers arguing the case, and each other.

Outside, on the court steps, he rebuts the conservative justices’ main argument against killing gerrymandering: that it’s a political problem, and not one the courts should adjudicate. “As Einstein said, those who created the problem will not be able to solve it,” Schwarzenegger says.

Afterward, at a rally for Common Cause, the good-government group, he explains why of all things, he’s made this his cause. In California, he saw gerrymandering lead to the parties running to their respective corners and not getting anything done, and he says the same thing has happened in Washington. “It’s time to say, ‘Hasta la vista’ to gerrymandering. Terminate it!”

The way Schwarzenegger sees it, nothing major has gotten done in America since 2000. Congress has a lower approval rating than herpes, he likes to joke. So that’s where he comes in.

“I came to America. I made my money in America. Now, let’s fix America,” he told me. His adopted country is starting to come apart, he worries, and it’s because no one has shown the leadership to bring it together.

“I see down the line a decline, and we get a little bit of a taste of that now. There is a lack of working together. No one sees themselves as a team. It’s all about ‘Me, me, me.’ That’s not America,” he says. “My biggest fear is: If this plane takes off and the pilot doesn’t know where we’re going, we’ll be flying around and we may crash. Because no one was telling where we’re going. Same thing with this.”

* * *

A friend of Schwarzenegger’s, the German bodybuilder-turned-actor Ralf Möller, a towering hulk of a man who played a bruiser in “Gladiator,” tells me at Oktoberfest that he wants me to write that his friend should be secretary of state.

How about that? I ask Schwarzenegger later.

He responds by rattling off other jobs that might interest him — EPA, Energy. But the State idea clearly intrigues him.

“It’s just that if a president asks me, and says, ‘Go and step in, you could really move the agenda,’ of course, I would do it. We would figure out the rules, figure out what I can do, am I just a puppet in there — ‘Do I have to ask some schmuck from the White House to go and make a move?’” he says, the misadventures of Rex Tillerson and Jeff Sessions on his mind. “No, I would never do that, because my ego would never allow it. And the country doesn’t deserve it.”

He says he’d even consider it if the call came in from Trump. His ex-wife’s mother, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, he says, taught him, “You never ever turn down a president.” (Later, he jokes: “Maybe I can’t be in the Cabinet because I fly commercial too much.”)

The job he really wants, he knows, is out of reach. “I’d be running in two seconds if I was born in America,” he says.

Flying back from his old house to his fancy hotel in Munich in the private jet, having happily obliged the latest airport police officer who slyly slid out his phone for a picture with him, he says he’s made his peace with that.

“I can’t make myself be angry about it because everything else that I’ve accomplished is because of America. So how can I complain about the one thing that I can’t do? Hello? Look where I’m sitting,” he says. “I didn’t even dream half of it.”

Vishnou

freddie silver

@ Vishnou
Politico writers can mock who they like. If the result is funny, readers will be amused. Nothing wrong with that. Satire is an old art.
“…Brain vs muscles: never-ended dilemma? Please widen your horizon..”
Would rather say: brain vs. comments: never ending dilemma……….